Wow thank you 
That’s very nice from you, I gladly take this compliment I don’t know what to say really haha.
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it was actually their keyboardist luminor that passed away,he did do backing vocals though but he wasnt really the vocalist of the band. the main vocalist was strify and hes still alive and making music i believe
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agreed, there really has not been any current bands from the west that interested me in recent years like they did.
I guess anyone getting into this scene without being inherently into it is kinda weird. For me, I was a HUGE .hack//SIGN fan. Saw an anime MV for “Forbidden” by D’EspairsRay and was like yo this song is lit… listened to more DR and then that spread to other bands “like” them (e.g. VK bands) and then boom. I was born.
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Now that’s a place I haven’t thought about in like 14 years lmao. I’ll never forget the great big drama over a video of a guy who looked just like Kyo from DEG surfacing on some sketchy site and the debate about whether or not it was actually him. I think the video was deleted when the poster realized that people knew who it was and the comment section of it was lit with arguing lmao 
Those were the days though ;; i wish people had screenshots because I’m sure that shit would still be hilarious now as it was then.
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For J-rock in general, as my dad was super into anything that was labeled as metal during the late 80s/early 90s. Didn’t matter what kind of metal it was, he liked it. I remember him blasting EZO’s Fire Fire and Cats in Boots’ debut on cassette a lot when i was 4-6 years old.
However, for me getting actually into J-rock/VK, it was in 1999-ish and I was either using Yahoo or Ask Jeeves to look up Pikachu/Pokemon fansite and some how clicked on an English Dead Pop Stars site. I sort of forgotten about VK for a while until I got into Digimon and ended up making friends with two girls that were older than me and into VK. One was super into GLAY and L’arc en Ciel and the other one was into Enamel/Key Party bands. Neither of them are still into VK or anime anymore, but I still keep in touch with them.
I just remember the suffering of trying to download a crappy 96kbps mp3 off of Geocities and that it would take between an hour to 2 hours to download.
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I see, thanks. 
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I didn’t find any info about Jack E. Strify’s death, but a lot of rumors about his infection of COVID-19 tho… and yeah he’s still a solo artist ever released an album 5 years ago…
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I totally agree, even DNR (Dreams Not Reality) doesn’t attract me that much as Cinema Bizarre did to me tbh. also, synth/glam rock genre is dying.
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It all started in 2001 when a friend of mine lent me a VHS containing some J-rock MVs that he recorded from a TV program at late night. There were GLAY, L’Arc-en-Ciel, and Λucifer MVs. When I saw them for the first time, I was like “This is the kind of music I have been looking for. I want to hear more of J-rock.” I have been following the J-rock scene ever since.
There were a bunch of small online J-rock communities in the form of webboards back then. In 2002, another friend of mine recommended Dir en grey to me. Yokan was my first Dir en grey song. I got introduced to new VK bands through MP3 rotation sites in 2004. I joined Batsu in 2005. My English was very poor, but I kept trying to communicate with other international J-rock fans. It’s all thanks to J-rock that helps me improve my English over the years.
I used SoulSeek regularly in 2006 for music exchange. I was a member of Tonberry Torrents to get new stuff. (Well, I can’t believe that the site is still online nowadays. It even outlives MH.) I decided to join Tainted World in 2008 and had been an active member since then. And you know the rest.
JUNK CITY by Λucifer was composed by Chisato (PENICILLIN).
I still listen to the songs that got me into J-rock occasionally up till now.
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wow, that reminds me of the days while watching the anime “快感・フレーズ” and got to know Λucifer and Emu. that “堕天使BLUE” is so popular…
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Oh right! Λucifer was formed after the fictional band from the manga/anime. They even used the same stage names except for Makoto.
the funny thing is that I watched the anime first but seems like most ppl are opposite lol come on! 三木眞一郎 and 鈴村健一 are there! 
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I met Visual kei in 2007 with animes in particular Claymore, due to the opening with Nightmare’s music, but I didn’t look deeply.
At the beginning of 2008 I went to watch the movie Saw IV and in the extras of the DVD there was the music IV of the band X-Japan, I remember that I didn’t like the band hahaha, but I went looking for it, I came across several bands of the time that the fans liked most of these bands I didn’t like it hahaa
Until one day I was surfing the internet and found a download link for the album “Madeth gray’ll ～ 悲劇 ノ 終 幕 ～” I liked the cover and decided to download it, on this day I became a fan of the band Madeth Gray’ll and came to discover the kote kei.
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Sometime around 2002/2003 a friend showed me (probably bootleg copies) of Gackt’s “MARS” and Dir en grey’s “Kisou”. It didn’t really win me over but put japanese music on the map for me.
A couple years later I got really into anime and consequently into japanese music - Dir en grey, MUCC, the Gazette, Girugamesh, D’espairsRay just to name a few. I also went outside the visual kei circle and discovered great artists like Mono, Boris, Envy and World’s End Girlfriend. The infatuation with japanese music ended after a couple of import-heavy years and I also sold a good deal of my CDs.
In recent years I began following some of the bigger and more established bands - Dir en grey, Gazette, MUCC, Acidman - again. Keeping up with current and new artists feels like too much of a hassle nowadays
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It was in 2007 when I came across The Gazette’s Taion MV. I loved it and even checked out a couple more songs and also listened to some An Cafe & one Dir en Grey song but I never fully committed to being a fan until this year when I got back into the scene.
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I was friends with this dude online who would go through these obsessions with bands, but he was always into smth different. one of those times he got into vk and wouldn’t shut up about diru, so I looked into them and ended up liking it. it only spiraled from there when I was able to get a couple friends into it with me, lolol. this was in like 2002/2003 I wanna say.
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MSN and orkut era, I was a fan of post-hc bands, don’t judge me lol, in the groups of bands, I became friend with a guy with a very “extravagant” look, he kind of did “visual kei” and gothic looks. He recommended MAXIMUM THE HORMONE and the gazettE - Cassis, it was love at first sight with the band, so I researched the internet deeply and ended up discovering a vast new addiction. Visual kei bands. : v
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Was 2005 I think, there was an unnamed 2 second clip from Dir en Grey on German TV and I wanted to hear the rest of it because I was addicted to the anime on RTL2
My google-fu led me to some chinese server hosted on a toaster behind a 56k modem, but they had pictures of the bands next to the download links and therefore my first band was … Shulla! Their singer looked a bit like Kyo in the clip lol
My next steps were random songs from rotation blogs (Vasalla, Psycho le Cemu, Plastic Tree, etc), Animexx (German anime forum) introduced me to some bands (Dir en Grey, Kagerou, D’espairsray, Malice Mizer, Gazette, the usual stuff) and at some point I ended up on Batsu and caught rare indies disease
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H.O.T.
my childhood
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